And according to my admittedly unscientific survey, 95% of the American public is also unable to muster any outrageous outrage over water being poured on faces. Oh, sure: The punditocracy and politicos all go on tv, and recite the same, tired platitudes about “stains on our conscience,” and all the rest of their dreck, but they don’t care either.

When you really, really CARE about something, it sticks in your head; it eats at you. You throw your entire existence into the subject at hand. You work day and night to solve the problem. It isn’t hitting “like” on Facebook and calling it a day. Does that sort of caring adequately depict how you feel about bad guys getting bags put on their heads?

Because now, everyone plays pretend all the time. They PRETEND to care that Islamic fanatics got water poured on their faces. They PRETEND to be outraged that a jerkoff got shot after punching a cop in the face and grabbing his gun. They PRETEND to really, really care about what some actor says in a Playboy interview. I could go on and on. But now, everyone is conditioned to Say The Correct Thing. Any deviation from that results in… what, exactly? Mean tweets?

When it comes time to form an opinion on this extremely serious topic, I find it helpful to think back to that day on September 11, 2001. It’s important to remember the context of that time. WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS HAPPENING. For all we knew, there were thousands of sleeper cell suicide bombers loose in United States just waiting to fly more planes into buildings. Even the most fervent hippies out there were baying for blood; we wanted to hurt people, not “start a dialogue” or “have a conversation” or whatever the useless phrase of the moment is.

Our problem in this day and age is simple: our memories fade far too rapidly. Nobody seems to remember that fateful September morning in which we here on the West Coast awoke to see smoke pouring out of the Twin Towers and civilians jumping to their deaths.

We don’t remember the thousands of innocent civilians who just went to work that day, only to end up in ashes.

We don’t remember our hundreds of firefighters and policemen trapped in those buildings; the terror they must have felt as the floor shook; the dawning realization that they were falling to their doom.

We don’t remember our 18-year-old soldiers screaming as their guts lay strewn out before them; their bodies burned beyond recognition; their backs broken; their pelvises shattered.

We don’t remember our young mothers getting that knock at the door to be told that the man in their life has been mutilated beyond belief by a cowardly explosive device and will need to be taken care of for the rest of his life; taken care of as one would care for a child.

We don’t remember the enemy who sends their women and children out adorned with suicide bombs amongst us to rip the flesh from our bodies; soldier, civilian, young and old.

We don’t remember entire generation of young men killed and maimed trying to instill western, democratic values on a backwards theocratic culture that really, REALLY isn’t interested in western, democratic values.

We don’t remember a savage mob ambushing four American contractors, murdering them, burning and mutilating their bodies, and hanging them from a bridge for the world to see while the crowd danced and cheered below.

We don’t remember these animals murdering our aid workers, or killing our ambassador, or blowing up our diplomats trying to bring about some sort of change to a medieval culture.

So now, because we don’t remember, the effeminate harpies of the western media/political world have all gotten together to collectively lecture us on how this is totes horrible and super mean before calling it a day and going off to get mani-pedis at the local bathhouse. I mean, just look at this clown going full retard. HE’S OUTRAGED!!! YOU GUYS, THEY PLACED SACKS OVER THEIR HEADS!!!

Seriously, don’t the people who run television news and the dying newspaper industry ever get tired of having the same, boring fucks on who all sit around, and nod and agree, speaking bureaucrat-ese and saying the exact same freaking thing? Any room for something different?

STOP accepting the premise the media puts forth, that this absolute brutality and didn’t gain anything. I reject that premise. I say to you I’m glad we put them in discomfort. I shouldn’t even call it torture; frankly, on a scale of one to Liam Neeson in Taken on the torture scale, this was nothing.

“HORRIFIC DETAILS FROM TORTURE REPORT!!!” screams the headline at a USA today story. I’m not horrified at all. Are you horrified? Didn’t think so. But they know that This Is The Expected Tone For This Topic.

The media would have you believe, just because they didn’t discover some ticking time bomb straight out of a terrible, terrible action movie, that there was nothing gained. This is absolute nonsense. It’s one, huge investigation. Like a massive, intercontinental FBI conspiracy case. You learn names; names that lead to other names that lead to other names. Or buildings, or locations, or descriptions. It’s not some specific countdown plot; rather, it’s a giant picture that is painted for the interrogators over a long, long period.

And don’t tell me about how this will “embolden our enemies.” I hope it does embolden our enemies. Bring the cockroaches out from behind the fridge so that they may be bathed and cleansed by the sweet, sweet light of freedom.

Also: does that mean that they weren’t emboldened BEFORE we poured water on their faces? Because they came into our country, hung out for a while, went to some titty bars, leisurely learned how to fly planes at our schools, and then drove them into one of the most well-known buildings on the planet. Sounds like they were pretty freaking emboldened already.

The American far left and the media seems to believe that everybody detained by our military and government agencies was just a simple peace-loving goat herder sitting around daydreaming of the day when his progressive religion of peace imam would raise his taxes to pay for more government pensions down at the ministry of goats, thereby assuring that from each, according to his ability, to each, according to his need or something.

That’s not what these guys were. They were all grabbed for reason: THEY’RE ALL BAD GUYS. They were all the guys in the streets cheering the day that those towers fell; they all hailed the demise of the Great Satan, and they all sit and clap on as their women and daughters are mutilated by clitoridectomies and stoned to death for perceived transgressions.

And when you are trying to get information out of them, under tremendous pressure from Washington, in a war zone, you’ll do anything. And if that means you have to lean on them hard, so be it.

So yeah, it sort of chaps my ass when I get to turn on the TV and am treated to the spectacle of the Crazed Local Imam President of the United States stand there and talk about how this is contrary to who we are. I will grudgingly concede that he didn’t go as far as some of his moronic colleagues did.

Allow me to present a hypothetical scenario. You get to choose one of the following: having a little bit of water poured on your face for a few minutes, or death. Oh, and for your manner of death, you can choose to either burn alive or jump from a building one hundred stories up and splatter all over the sidewalk below. Which would you choose?

OUR PEOPLE didn’t get to make that choice.

So to watch handwringing about torture makes me sick. Allow me to blow your mind with two points: One, all the politicians knew about it. Two, they don’t care. This is just an excuse that they can bash their political enemies with, all the while pretending that they knew nothing, which is laughable on it’s face.

If you recall what I wrote in my last column, I mention what we did in the face of a catastrophic ground war with Japan. Not what we wanted to do, but what we felt was necessary to save American lives:

Look at how Japan was dealt with in WW II. They make a pretty good comparison to today’s enemy: Dug into their home turf, fanatical, willing to use suicide as a weapon, and fans of swords. So when it came time to invade, we just nuked them. Zero fucks were given. And then, juuuuuust to be on the safe side, we dropped a second one on them a few days later. WE HAD TO BE SURE. Japan surrendered approximately 4 minutes later.

Of course, that was when we had serious men in charge of the country, facing a serious enemy. We knew, in order to defeat this scourge that was threatening the globe, that we had to utterly destroy not only their homes, but their will.

And look how that turned out. We took one of the most fearsome, belligerent warrior cultures on the planet and turned them into our housecat. They haven’t said ‘boo” in 70 years. Now when I think of Japan, I think of a polite people who make sex robots. Not bad!

So a SENSIBLE country would say something like, “yep, we bothered some people by pouring water on their faces and kept them up for a long time in order to extract information. We didn’t LIKE doing it, but it was our duty. Please, don’t make us do it again. Because the next time YOU MAKE US DO IT, it’s going to be pliers and blowtorch playtime.”

In the end… well, war is hell, isn’t it? Shit happens. People die. That’s why war is so terrible. So you enter it reluctantly, execute it vigorously, and then get the hell away from it. Fourteen years in Afghanistan and counting…

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Christopher Barry

best damn article i have read in a long time. LOVE IT.

mrspaul

"I reached into my bag of fucks and couldn't find any to give."
BK...That is the best line ever written!!! This article is the one that caused me to stop and pay attention to what you have to say. Sure, we Women of SOFREP throw a lot of sexist shit your way, but it's all in good fun. The respect, support, and admiration is real, however. Thank you for standing up for the Patriot, of which I am. Thank you for calling bullshit on a governmental agenda that no longer works. Yet we still believe in the process. Thank you for standing up for the kids, and for America. You are 24-karat solid gold, and we are grateful that you are writing for SOFREP!!! You Rock!!!

Axeman15

It pains me to even put this on here but one of the very assholes we had in Gitmo ... You know, one of those we released , now has a 5 million dollar reward offered by the USA.
He is linked to AQ
And your all probably saying " no shit" about now?
Well, I certainly was when I read it.
How many more before it's over? Rhetorically, we will have to either recapture them all or just kill them. The latter is far less hassle as the bleeding hearts will not be given a chance to cry it's enhumane or torture.
So those who think it was torture but said well, if he kills my own or if he is a known AQ bad guy then it's ok to extract info.
Now what? Do you want to attempt to point out who is or isn't a bad guy? There was a reason they are locked up.
Just also read ISIS was actually formulated in an Iraqi prison camp on one bad guys thought. I still hold the conviction we should have at least two sniper divisions and employ them heavily until every suspected bad guy is gone. Since we will not be turning sand to glass, surgically remove them. Finish this

Axeman15

SM24, your family is connected to one of the most forward thinking , aggressive Fire fighting machine on earth.
Haz Mat / medic! Outstanding! Father and son Brunacini were a great team. I heard dirt on big Al... He is done, he lectures now anyway.
That is what we do, kudos back at you. .... And your family of Red Hats. !!
I fear somewhere along the way, we got off point. Bringing it in, again... Bk's point about coercion... We get to do what our calling is/was because warriors gather up bad guys, teams of interrogators , or Alligators, extract info so said warriors can go exterminate the vermin, grab more bad guys, and start the cycle again.
Plugging us in is way down the pipeline as we being the bearer of freedom provided by those down range. God bless them all.

susanmarie24

Kudos to you Axeman! My father was a Captain in the Phoenix Fire Department for over 25 years, my brother is also Captain in the Phoenix Fire Department but is also a certified Paramedic/Haz Mat guy who has also taught other firefighters so, in a way my family reminds me of your service. I know first hand of how much they gave and have given but it has never been an obligation but a duty they have willingly given by doing what they could--as do you.